My contribution to a review forum on Juliet Fall’s remarkable books Bornées: Une histoire illustrée de la frontière (Mētis); Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography (EPFL) has now been published online first in Dialogues in Human Geography
Stuart Elden, “Visuality and Vocabulary in Political Geography“.
It requires subscription, but as ever, email if you want to see it and don’t have institutional access.
Arden Shakespeare fourth series – first three volumes scheduled
Julius Caesar, edited by Andrew James Hartley
Titus Andronicus, edited by Curtis Perry and Ayanna Thompson
As You Like It, edited by Tom Bishop
The first two are scheduled for May, and the third for September. Thanks to Chathan Vemuri for the news that publication is beginning.
Lawrence Douglas, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice – Princeton University Press, April/June 2026
The Criminal State offers a gripping account of how law has confronted the most radical forms of state violence. Beautifully written, broad in scope, and bracingly original, it weaves history with political thought to trace the shifting legal response to state aggression and atrocities, from Leopold’s rule over the Congo to Putin’s war in Ukraine.
At its heart is Lawrence Douglas’s fresh interpretation of the law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—while leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights.
Providing rare historical perspective on the dilemmas facing international courts, The Criminal State is a sweeping, provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice.
Anthony Gottlieb, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes – Yale University Press, January 2026
The first biography in more than three decades of the Austrian-born thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century
According to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), philosophy is a “battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” This audacious idea changed the way many of its practitioners saw their subject. In the first biography of Wittgenstein in more than three decades, Anthony Gottlieb evaluates this revolutionary idea, explaining the evolution of Wittgenstein’s thought and his place in the history of philosophy.
Wittgenstein was born into an immensely rich Viennese family but yearned to live a simple life, and he gave away his inheritance. After studying with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, he wrote his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while serving in World War I. He then took several positions as a primary-school teacher in rural Austria before returning as a fellow to Cambridge, where a cultlike following developed around him. Wittgenstein worked not only as a philosopher and schoolteacher, but also as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester and as an architect in Vienna.
Gottlieb’s meticulously researched book traces the itinerant and troubled life of Wittgenstein, the development of his influential ideas, and the Viennese intellectual milieu and family background that shaped him.
C. G. Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Work: Interviews for Memories, Dreams, Reflections with Aniela Jaffé – ed. Sonu Shamdasani, Princeton University Press, December 2025/January 2026
In 1957, at the age of eighty-one, C. G. Jung began a collaboration with his student and secretary Aniela Jaffé and the legendary publisher Kurt Wolff on a book about his life. Memories, Dreams, Reflections would become a bestseller, yet it draws from less than half of Jaffé’s original interviews with Jung. Much of the material from these candid, wide-ranging conversations was left on the cutting-room floor. Jung’s Life and Work presents these interviews in their entirety for the first time.
Marking the 150th anniversary of Jung’s birth, this new English translation captures the cadence and subtlety of the brilliant psychologist in his own words, giving voice to a thinker and teacher who is by turns witty and intellectually daring but also vulnerable and humbled by the world’s great mysteries. It restores numerous passages that were originally omitted or heavily edited and toned down for publication, “auntified” as Jung himself put it. Taken together, these talks reveal Jung actively discovering meaningful new connections in his life’s work. He shares his impressions of notable figures he encountered throughout his life—such as Sigmund Freud, William James, Albert Einstein, and H. G. Wells—and describes his striking visions, religious and paranormal experiences, and pioneering self-experimentation. Aided by Jaffé’s skillful questioning, Jung reflects on subjects ranging from Christianity and Buddhism and the fate of the West to the experiences that led to the formulation of his signature concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, anima and animus, and the shadow as well as on karma, the afterlife, and much more.
With an introduction and extensive annotations by acclaimed Jung scholar Sonu Shamdasani that provide invaluable historical perspective, Jung’s Life and Work includes previously unpublished extracts from Jung’s letters and a completely reorganized text.
Archivaria 100: Special Issue – Legacies of Critical Theory in Archives (Fall/Winter 2025)
The issue is not yet on Project Muse and requires subscription.
The issue contains Steven Maynard, “Michel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives“, Archives,” Archivaria 100 (fall/winter 2025): 44-73
Steven has said he is happy to share his piece if you email him.
In a previous pieces in this series I’ve discussed Étienne Wolff’s work on the biology of monsters, some of which was written during his time in Oflag XVII-A during the Second World War. (An Oflag was a Offizierslager – a German camp for Allied officers.) I then followed up with a more general post about the French professors who wrote books in these camps, and said a bit about the Université de Captivité which Wolff helped to run, alongside the mathematician Jean Leray. In future work I hope to say a bit more about the teaching in that camp.
In the second of those pieces I mentioned perhaps the most famous book written in German captivity, Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II. It was first published in 1949 and translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Lucien Febvre was fundamental in the shift of emphasis: “Philip II and the Mediterranean is a fine subject. But why not the Mediterranean and Philip II? Isn’t that an even more fascinating subject? Because between the two protagonists, Philip and the internal sea, the match is not equal” (Febvre, “Un livre qui grandit”, p. 217). François Dosse comments on this move: “Thus history changed its subject, no longer Philip II but the Mediterranean, a geographical subject for a historian. It was a decisive manoeuvre that Braudel skilfully mastered as he took up the suggestion and the legacy of Febvre” (New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, p. 108).
In a piece on his intellectual formation, first published in English in 1972, Braudel discusses meeting Febvre, his imprisonment and the book’s composition.
In the summer of 1939 at Souget, in Lucien Febvre’s house, I prepared to begin writing my book. And then the war! I served on the Rhine frontier. From 1940 to 1945 I was a prisoner in Germany, first in Mainz, then from 1942 to 1945 in the special camp at Lübeck, where my Lorrainer’s rebelliousness sent me. As I returned safe and sound from this long time of testing, complaining would be futile and even unjust; only good memories come back to me now. For prison can be a good school. It teaches patience, tolerance. To see arriving in Lübeck all the French officers of Jewish origin – what a sociological study! And later, sixty-seven clergymen of every hue, who had been judged dangerous in their various former camps – what a strange experience that was! The French church appeared before me in all its variety, from the country curé to the Lazarist, from the Jesuit to the Dominican. Other experiences: living with Poles, brave to excess; and receiving the defenders of Warsaw, among them Alexander Gieysztor and Witold Kula. Or to be submerged one fine day by the massive arrival of Royal Air Force pilots; and living with all the French escape artists, who were sent to us as a punishment; these are – and I omit much – among the picturesque memories.
But what really kept me company during those long years – that which distracted me in the true etymological meaning of the word – was the Mediterranean. It was in captivity that I wrote that enormous work, sending school copy book after school copy book to Lucien Febvre. Only my memory permitted this tour de force. Had it not been for my imprisonment, I would surely have written quite a different book (“Ma formation d’historien”, pp. 14-15; “Personal Testimony”, p. 453).
Braudel apparently had to be persuaded quite hard to write down these memories (see Marino, “The Exile and His Kingdom”, p. 624 n. 11), and as far as I’m aware, wrote little else about his time in a camp. He did however edit an issue of the Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale on the question of captivity, to which he contributed a short preface, but it says little about his personal experience.
The two camps he mentions in his testimony are Oflag XII-B in Mainz and Special Oflag X-C in Lübeck, and the transfer from one to the other he attributes to his “Lorrainer’s rebelliousness”, and was likely down to his Gaullist sympathies. (The question of the relation between Pétainist and Gaullist elements within the army and especially in the camps is a whole other topic.) He was able to access some books while in the camp, including from the local library, but had to rely on his memory for a great deal. He wrote at least one article published during his captivity, published in 1943, and a book review of Gaston Roupnel, Histoire et destin which he sent to Febvre and was published in the final year of the occupation. An editorial note to the article says that while Braudel was able to compose the article and send it to the journal he was unable to review the proofs (p. 3). The school notebooks in which he composed the draft of the Mediterranean study, and which he sent regularly to Febvre, were unfortunately destroyed after he had revised the text. It is generally said that it was Braudel’s standard practice to destroy drafts of completed books (Pierre Daix, Braudel, p. 165 n. 1; editor note to Les Écrits de Fernand Braudel, Vol II, p. 11), but Erato Paris says two notebooks survive (La genèse intellectuelle de l’oeuvre de Fernand Braudel, p. 306). Another piece from the war was published as the first essay in the relaunched Annales after the war, on coins and civilisations, from gold in the Sudan to American silver. One indication of the provenance of this particular text comes in its form – unusually for a historical work, it has no footnotes.
The book on the Mediterranean does have extensive notes, and if Braudel had access to limited sources during the war he was able to rework it afterwards when back in Paris, before defending it as his thesis. Based on the limited sources which survive, there is a surprising amount about the composition of the book. The most thorough accounts I know of the book’s composition are by Erato Paris in the final part of La genèse intellectuelle de l’oeuvre de Fernand Braudel, as well as Chapter VI of the biography of Braudel by Daix. Both Paris and Daix make a lot of use of correspondence to shed light on the experience of writing in the camp, especially the unpublished Braudel-Febvre letters. Dosse indicates that while much of the writing was done in the camps, much of the research was done before the war: “This fact disproves the hypothesis according to which the book’s structure was conceived as an antidote to the German news about the war, as if it were a form of escape into long duration in contrast to the daily events broadcast over Nazi radio” (New History in France, p. 108).
On Braudel’s experience in the camp and the writing of this text, the account by his widow Paule Braudel, first published in Italian and later in French, is very good, and expands in some respects on her earlier “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: Un témoignage”. Paule Braudel explains that the Braudel-Febvre correspondence, which is in the Archives Nationales, has been prepared for publication. The originals of the letters are apparently now too fragile to be consulted, and her edition of the text was established on the basis of a photocopy. It would undoubtedly reveal more of the story, but has not been published due to the wishes of one of Febvre’s heirs.
In English, there is a chapter by Peter Schöttler, which discusses the writing of the book and his correspondence with Febvre, and an article by Howard Caygill, “Braudel’s Prison Notebooks”. Caygill led me to the Annales article which came from this period (p. 155). He also notes that Henri Pirenne, the Belgian historian who was important in the early years of the Annales, and who had an extensive correspondence with Marc Bloch and Febvre, had first presented his History of Europe as lectures in a camp in World War One (p. 153). According to his “Souvenirs de captivité en Allemagne (mars 1916-novembre 1918)”, Pirenne, who was forbidden access to books, learnt Russian from a Russian officer and then later read Russian history books which gave him a different perspective on Europe’s history. His son Jacques Pirenne’s preface to the posthumously published History of Europe gives more details.
Braudel’s article and review in 1943 and 1944 were published during the short period when the Annales journal, which had several variant names over the years, was called Mélanges d’histoire sociale. Bloch and Febvre had disagreed on how to respond to German censorship and Vichy laws excluding Jews from academic positions. In the end there was a compromise: the journal would change name, and no editors were listed, so that Bloch, who was Jewish, was neither formally removed as editor nor publicised. All the content was subject to German and Vichy censorship, as were all publications in France during the Occupation. (I write about the ‘Liste Otto’ of prohibited books here, in relation to Henri Lefebvre.) Bloch continued to write for the Mélanges under the pseudonym Marc Fougères. The third volume of the Bloch-Febvre correspondence is useful for their discussions about how best to handle the constraints of the Occupation. (On the story of Annales during the war, Natalie Zemon Davis’s articles “Rabelais among the Censors” and “Censorship, Silence and Resistance” are very good, and Chapter 20 of Philippe Burrin’s Living with Defeat is also useful. There are many books on intellectuals in the Occupation generally, of which Gisèle Sapiro, The French Writers’ War is particularly good.)
I had not known until recently that some of Braudel’s lectures from the Oflag were published as “L’histoire, mesure du monde”. The French version is in the second volume of the posthumous Écrits de Fernand Braudel – a three-volume collection, recently reissued as a single volume. (Écrits de Fernand Braudel should not be confused with Écrits sur l’histoire, published in his lifetime, with a second posthumous volume, even though there is a lot of overlap of content.) “L’histoire, mesure du monde” is an introductory course on history, but as far as I’m aware these lectures are not available in English. The lectures are interesting for many reasons, including the discussions of different temporalities, the relation between history and geography, and the idea of geohistory, and the approach of the historian to their material. There is some discussion of different French and German approaches to history, intriguing given they were delivered by a Frenchman in a German camp, but also probably due to his limited access to reading material at the time. They date from the time Braudel was drafting the book on the Mediterranean, and it’s striking he was outlining how to do history at this early stage of his interrupted career. They deserve fuller treatment.
As I indicated in a previous post, the more I explore this topic, the more I realise how important the experience of captivity was to so many intellectual careers and work in the middle of the twentieth century.
References
Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, Correspondance Tome III: Les «Annales» en crise (1938-1943), ed. Bertrand Müller, Paris: Fayard, 2003.
Fernand Braudel, “À travers un continent d’histoire. Le Brésil et l’œuvre de Gilberto Freye”, Mélanges d’histoire sociale 4, 1943, 3-20.
Fernand Braudel, “Faillité de l’histoire: Triomphe du destin?” Mélanges d’histoire sociale 6, 1944, 71-77.
Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: A. Colin, three volumes, 1949, second edition 1966; The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, London: Fontana, two volumes, 1975.
Fernand Braudel, “La captivité devant l’histoire”, Revue d’histoire de la deuxième Guerre Mondiale 7 (1), 1957, 3-5.
Fernand Braudel, “Monnaies et Civilisations: De l’or du Soudan à l’argent d’amerique: Un drame mediterranéen”, Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations 1 (1), 1946, 9-22; reprinted in Les Ambitions de l’histoire: Écrits de Fernand Braudel Vol 2, Editions de Fallois, Paris, 1997, 277-95.
Fernand Braudel, “Personal Testimony”, The Journal of Modern History 44 (4), 1972, 448-67; later published in French as “Ma formation d’historien” in Écrits sur l’histoire II, Paris: Flammarion, 1994, 9-29.
Fernand Braudel, “L’histoire, mesure du monde”, edited by Paule Braudel and Roselyne de Ayala in Les Ambitions de l’histoire: Écrits de Fernand Braudel Vol 2, Editions de Fallois, Paris 1997, 11-83.
Paule Braudel, “Les origines intellectuelles de Fernand Braudel: Un témoignage”, Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 47 (1), 1992, 237-44.
Paule Braudel, “Prefazione all’edizione italiana”, in Fernand Braudel, Storia, misura del mondo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998, 7-20; revised version as “Braudel en captivité”, in Paul Carmignani ed., Autour de F. Braudel, Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2002, 13-25, https://books.openedition.org/pupvd/3839?lang=en
Philippe Burrin, Living with Defeat: France Under the German Occupation 1940-1944, trans. Janet Lloyd, London: Arnold, 1996.
Paul Carmignani ed., Autour de F. Braudel, Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2017.
Howard Caygill, “Braudel’s Prison Notebooks”, History Workshop Journal 57, 2004, 151-60.
Pierre Daix, Braudel, Paris: Flammarion, 1995.
François Dosse, New History in France: The Triumph of the Annales, trans. Peter V. Conroy, Jr., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Lucien Febvre, “Un livre qui grandit: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen”, Revue historique 203, 1950, 216-24.
Bryce and Mary Lyon, The Birth of Annales History: The Letters of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch to Henri Pirenne (1921-1935), Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1991.
John A. Marino, “The Exile and His Kingdom: The Reception of Braudel’s Mediterranean”, Journal of Modern History76 (3), 2004, 622-52.
Erato Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’oeuvre de Fernand Braudel: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Phillipe II, 1923-1947, Athènes: Institut de recherche néohelléniques/FNRS, 1999.
Henri Pirenne, Histoire de l’Europe des invasions au XVIe siècle, Paris, Alcan, 1936; A History of Europe from the Invasions to the XVI Century, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1939.
Henri Pirenne, “Souvenirs de captivité en Allemagne (mars 1916-novembre 1918)”, https://www.larevuedesressources.org/souvenirs-de-captivite-en-allemagne-mars-1916-novembre-1918,2187.html
Gaston Roupnel, Histoire et destin, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1943.
Gisèle Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains 1940-1953, Paris: Fayard, 1999; The French Writers’ War, 1940-1953, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
Peter Schöttler, “Fernand Braudel as Prisoner in Germany: Confronting the Long Term and the Present Time”, in Anne-Marie Pathé, Fabien Théofilakis, eds., Wartime Captivity in the Twentieth Century: Archives, Stories, Memories, trans. Helen McPhail, New York: Berghahn, 2016, 103-14. (A translation of Anne-Marie Pathé and Fabien Théofilakis (éds.), La Captivité de guerre au XXème siècle. Des archives, des histoires, des mémoires, Paris, Armand Colin, 2012.)
Natalie Zemon Davis, “Rabelais among the Censors (1940s, 1540s)”, Representations 32, 1990, 1-32.
Natalie Zemon Davis, “Censorship, Silence and Resistance: The Annales during the German Occupation of France”, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, 24 (2), 1998, 351–374.
This is the 53rd post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and now entering a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. They are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I’m not sure I’ll keep to a weekly rhythm in 2026, but there will be at least a few more pieces.
The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.
Tilman Schwarze and Matt Dawson eds. The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre – Anthem, March 2026
Reassesses Henri Lefebvre’s enduring relevance to sociology, examining themes from Marxism to urban life and proposing new directions for Lefebvrian research on rhythm, embodiment and utopian thought
Henri Lefebvre’s work, particularly his theory of the production of space, has been remarkably influential historically within geographical research. While this extensive research has shown the continuing relevance of Lefebvre’s oeuvre for urban geographical research, Lefebvre’s contributions to sociology have been less explored. This is surprising and a missed opportunity, not least because Lefebvre’s writings on the urban, space and everyday life were fundamentally informed by and connected to his sociology. This volume responds to this lacuna in sociological engagements with Lefebvre’s work, bringing together leading scholars on Lefebvre’s sociological work who discuss elements from across his sociological oeuvre. This includes topics for which Lefebvre is well known such as space, rhythm-analysis and Marxism, through to lesser-known topics such as the rural, autogestion, the state and violence and finally to studies which push Lefebvre into new areas such as time, phenomenology and the environment. Therefore, this volume not only achieves a breadth of coverage but also provides fresh insights for those familiar with Lefebvre and new points of interest for those encountering his sociology for the first time. Our volume makes a critical addition to the long list of established and influential Anthem Companions to Sociology by adding a new volume on one of the most influential Marxist sociologists and philosophers of the twentieth century. An engagement with the work of Henri Lefebvre remains indispensable for sociology as this volume shows.
Le thermomètre de Foucault, 9 Jan 2026, Journée d’étude organisée par Grégoire Chamayou (CNRS-ENS Paris), Frédéric Keck (CNRS-EHESS Paris) et Jean-Claude Monod (CNRS-ENS Paris).
Dans sa généalogie des savoirs biopolitiques, Michel Foucault a beaucoup parlé des milieux mais peu du climat. Pourtant, les notions de milieu et de climat sont souvent confondues au 19e siècle pour décrire les conditions d’existence d’un vivant qui rendent possible l’intervention d’un pouvoir. Mais si la notion de milieu conduit à contrôler les flux, comme le font les sciences de la population, celle de climat conduit à contrôler les températures, comme le font les sciences de l’acclimatation. Peut-on relire Michel Foucault à partir de la notion de climat, qui a pris un sens nouveau avec les mesures du réchauffement climatique ? En quoi la mesure de la température par des outils technologiques conduit-elle à interroger le moteur de la temporalité historique ?
Une telle question permet de revenir sur les relations entre Michel Foucault et Claude Lévi-Strauss. La distinction entre « sociétés froides » et « sociétés chaudes » renvoyait pour celui-ci à des modèles thermodynamiques différents d’insertion de l’évènement dans une structure qui lui préexiste. Foucault s’y réfère via Furet et ́la distinction entre une « histoire chaude », où l’observateur investit les mêmes discours que les acteurs, et une « histoire froide », que l’on peut approcher avec la même distance que l’ethnologue aborde les mythes des sociétés qu’il étudie. Il n’est pas question ici non plus de réchauffement climatique, mais d’usages de la métaphore du chaud et du froid et du modèle de la thermodynamique pour penser les modalités par lesquelles les sociétés contiennent ou opèrent leur transformation et son rythme. Peut-on dire alors que Foucault, en faisant une ethnologie des sociétés européennes, a refroidi notre histoire pour mieux diagnostiquer notre présent ? Quels seraient les objets et les terrains pour lesquels il serait urgent aujourd’hui de refroidir l’histoire ?
Emily Doucet, Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts – Duke University Press, April 2026
Félix Nadar took the first aerial photograph in 1858, so the story goes. The evidence, Emily Doucet notes, is mixed. In Inventing Nadar, Doucet analyzes the historical and material production of the nineteenth-century Parisian photographer’s famous and numerous photographic firsts. Focusing on these oft-labeled groundbreaking elements of his career, she deconstructs Nadar’s legacy as a prime protagonist in the history of photography by interrogating the media techniques used to construct his invention narratives. Doucet highlights this highly mediated process as one that canonized novel applications of photography as discrete techniques with single authors and inventors. Looking to this process of mediation through the institutions and individuals that shaped Nadar’s archives, Doucet unpacks assumptions of Nadar as a master of early photography and shows how the medium is enmeshed in larger histories of media, science, and technology. The result is both a new account of Nadar’s place in photographic history and a critical study of how stories of innovation take shape.
